The Final Kill

“I don’t know,” Jancy mumbled, covering her face with her hands. “Gone. Like always.”

Like always. Her tone of voice set alarm bells off in Abby’s head. “You said that before, honey. Does your mom go away a lot?”

Jancy shrugged.

“How often?” Abby asked.

“I don’t know. At least once a month.”

“Didn’t I hear somewhere that she gives speeches around the country? Something about voting for better health care?”

“Ha.”

“You don’t believe that’s what she’s doing?”

“Oh, sure, she does that sometimes. But a couple times when my school tried to reach her on one of those trips, they couldn’t. Her cell was off the whole three days she was gone, and when they called the hotel she was supposed to be staying at in Chicago, she wasn’t even registered.”

“What about when she got home? Did you ask her where she’d been? Maybe they lost the reservation and she stayed somewhere else.”

Jancy made a sound like a snort but didn’t answer. Abby studied her a moment, then reached for her hand. “C’mon, let’s get you out of there.”

Jancy turned away. Abby touched her arm gently until she looked at her. “C’mon, honey. It’s okay.”

“Will grown-ups ever stop saying things like that?” Jancy said angrily. “It’s not okay. Nothing’s ever okay!”

But she ducked her head and crawled out into the solarium, still not taking Abby’s hand. “Oh, God, I’m stiff!”

Standing, she stretched, bending from the waist and touching her toes. Letting out a long breath, she rose slowly, then raised her arms over her head, bending from side to side in an exercise position Abby recognized as hatha yoga. It seemed to come naturally to her, as if she’d done it out of habit, without thinking. Abby watched her curiously.

When it seemed Jancy was loosened up, Abby took her to the nearby bedroom that was always prepared for unexpected visitors. “It’s so quiet here,” Jancy whispered. “Doesn’t anybody live on this floor?”

Abby smiled. “There are eleven other women on this floor, and fifteen on the one above. It’s quiet because the sisters observe the Grand Silence, and the women who aren’t nuns join them in it, out of respect.”

“Grand Silence?”

“That means they don’t talk between night and morning prayers, except in an emergency.”

Jancy rolled her eyes. “Emergency? Here?”

“You’d be surprised,” Abby said. Two years ago, she’d been pushed from the chapel balcony at the end of this very floor. Murder and mayhem were the order of the day back then, and she was the one who’d brought it inside these walls.

“What about Sister Helen?” Jancy asked. “And the one who brought us our soup?”

“They’re exempted from keeping silence at night because their jobs sometimes require they talk.”

“Oh.”

Abby was glad she didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, Jancy sat heavily on one of the sparse twin beds with its coarse white linens. As she looked up at Abby her chin trembled, despite her brave attempt to hide it with a smile.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked. “Do I have to stay here till my mom comes back?”

“I don’t know,” Abby said honestly. “There are still a lot of questions to be answered. Like, first of all, why doesn’t your mom want you to be with your dad?”

“She told you, he has some important deal coming up. He can’t come home.”

“But now that your mom has left, if I tell him you’re alone here and what’s happened—”

“Believe me, he won’t come home,” Jancy said.

So her mother goes off on private little jaunts whenever the mood hits her, Abby thought, and her father’s too busy to hang around. Or at least he’s left her with that impression.

“You mentioned Big Sur,” she said. “Is that where you’ve been living? I thought you were still in L.A.”

“We are. But we come up to Big Sur sometimes. Look, I’m not supposed to talk about it. It’s not even ours.”

“What isn’t?” Abby asked.

“The house in Big Sur. My dad’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Randolph, loaned it to my dad so we’d have more privacy. From reporters and stuff, you know?”

She looked at Abby quickly, anxiety showing in her eyes. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Don’t worry,” Abby assured her. “My lips are zipped. But what were you doing at the Highlands Inn, if you weren’t staying there?”

“Having dinner in the restaurant,” Jancy said, yawning. “Can I go to sleep now?”

Abby had hoped Jancy might give her some clue as to what had actually happened, but the question had closed her down.

She studied the girl a moment, wondering if she should press for more. But the kid genuinely looked tired, and it wouldn’t have surprised Abby if she simply fell over with her clothes on and stayed like that all night.

“Of course. Get some sleep,” she said. On the side of the antique night table there was a button. “If anything happens that worries you, or if you just feel troubled, push this. It rings through to my room, and I’ll come right up.”

Abby took clean, plain white pajamas out of a drawer in the dresser, and put them on the bed for her. “Restrooms are down the hall on the right,” she said. “It’s communal, so you may run into some of the other women who live here. Don’t let that bother you, just don’t talk to them until after morning prayers. That’s at six. And here’s a clock so you’ll know what time it is when you wake up.”

Abby turned the tiny travel clock so that it faced the bed. “I see it’s almost five, so you’ll probably sleep through breakfast. When you’re ready, come down to the kitchen. It’s along the hall, the opposite way from where you and your mom came in. I’ll tell Sister Binny to expect you. But watch out. She’ll probably try to bury you under pancakes.”

For the first time, Abby thought she saw a genuine smile pass over Jancy’s face. It didn’t last long, but she was ready to take anything she could get.

“Thank you,” Jancy said softly. “I’m really sorry, Abby.”

“Sorry?” Abby said, surprised. “For what?”

“For all this trouble. For making you do so much stuff, and for being such a brat. You’ve been really nice.”

Abby smiled. “You’re pretty nice to do stuff for, Jancy. Now, sleep tight, and I’ll see you when you get up.”

Closing the door behind her, Abby was still smiling, but her expression quickly turned to a frown. She might not know a lot about teenagers, never having raised one, but one thing she had discovered from friends’ kids was that when they made such a fast turnaround from bratty to sweet, they usually wanted something.

Or they were planning something.

Like running away.

Abby didn’t even try to go back to bed. In her apartment, she changed clothes, then sat for a few minutes in her double-wide armchair before going to the kitchen. Ben and I used to sit in this chair and cuddle, she remembered. Used to. After tonight, will that ever happen again?

She deliberately tried not to think of Allie and where she had gone, why she had left her child here alone even after Abby had told her that was out of the question. It was all too much for one night—Allie and Jancy appearing without warning, then the FBI, Allie under suspicion for murder…

And Ben. His betrayal.

Back to Ben. Always back to Ben.

She squeezed her mind shut against that worry, but other memories crowded in. Her eyes took in this small, compact living room that she’d built for herself, and the few things she’d brought with her from Ocean Drive. She’d sold the multimillion-dollar house “as is” and fully furnished, except for the photos of her and Murphy—

Damn. At times like this, she missed Murphy more than ever. Her adventurous little dog had gotten loose one day and been struck by a car out on Carmel Valley Road. One of the carpenters, who helped build the very room she was sitting in, saw it happen and picked Murphy up off the road and carried him to her. The thing that had gotten to her most was that he looked just as he had when asleep, so she didn’t realize at first that he was gone. Then she saw the blood on the side of his head that was next to the carpenter’s arm. He had thoughtfully hidden it from her until the first shock was over.

Abby chose a spot on the edge of the forest to bury him. There were five other workmen on the property at the time, and they all stood around with the sisters and other women to offer prayers. By the time the little ceremony was over there were heaps of flowers on Murphy’s grave. The workmen brought wildflowers from the surrounding meadows, and it touched her heart to see their big, rough hands carrying those fragile little stems and placing them so carefully over Murphy’s grave. The Prayer House women brought early spring flowers from the gardens, and several of them wept along with her.

It took Abby a while to get past the stage where she was looking for her little companion around every corner and expecting him to be there to greet her when she walked through the door. She would never get over the feeling that it was her fault he ended up in the road in the first place. Murphy had an adventurous soul, and he’d gotten away once when he was younger. She should have been watching him better the day he died, but she’d trusted him not to run like that again.

Trust was a bitch. It could hurt the person who trusted, and the one trusted, as well. She would have to remember that when deciding what to do about Alicia and Jancy.

And Ben.

Impatiently, Abby shook her head as if shaking dust out of a rug, and went to the kitchen. Binny was already cooking hot cereal, and she returned Abby’s “Good morning” as she reached into the fridge for eggs to boil. The room was filled with the scent of oats, blueberry muffins and coffee.

A half-finished platter of sliced fruit was on the worktable, and Abby poured herself a cup of coffee and took up a knife to finish the job.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Binny said in her soft voice.

“I know. I just like to.”

Abby stole a look at Binny as she stood over the stove, her ordinarily pale face pink now from the steamy cereal. She was still in the black cotton robe that she always wore until after she’d cooked breakfast, and a white kerchief held back her wispy gray curls. For the second time this week, Abby thought she looked as if she was losing weight, and Binny of all people didn’t need that. She made a mental note to talk her into getting a checkup.

“You already do too much around here,” Binny said in the voice she saved for a quiet reprimand. “Didn’t I see you mucking out the stalls the other day?”

Abby smiled. “Oh, and what? I’m supposed to be above that?”

“No, you’re supposed to save your energy for your real work,” she said.

“Binny—”

“That’s all I’m sayin’. That and no more.”

Abby rolled her eyes and sighed. No one at the Prayer House was supposed to talk about Paseo unless absolutely necessary—a firm rule that kept everyone from slipping and saying something in front of the wrong people. Binny, though, was past the age where she followed rules.

And speaking of breaking rules, where was Helen?

“Have you seen Sister Helen?” Abby asked, cutting into a juicy ripe strawberry and popping half into her mouth.

“Not since last night when your visitors came,” Binny said.

This wasn’t at all like Helen. Abby was beginning to get worried. She was debating whether to rouse the other women and start a search party when Helen appeared on the back porch, wiping her boots on the bristles of the mud scraper.

“Where have you been?” Abby demanded, her voice rising with anxiety. “I was worried!”

“Oh, you were, were you? I seem to remember saying the same thing to you a few hundred times at St. Joseph’s High. I guess that makes us almost even now.”

Helen sat on the wooden bench next to the kitchen door and tugged off her wellies, the knee-high boots that she always wore for mucking about in the stables. Abby couldn’t fathom why she’d been out there at this early hour. She was about to ask when Helen’s face creased with pain as she tried to get one of the heavy rubber boots off.

“Here, let me do that,” Abby said. Helen flicked her a grateful smile and leaned back, sighing.

“I used to dream of a handsome young man pulling my skates off for me,” she said dreamily as Abby tugged at the first boot. “Down at the pond on my parents’ farm, that was. There would be a fire for us to warm our hands, and he’d be wearing a navy-blue sweater and a bright red scarf. We’d be sipping hot cider, and when he looked at me with those eyes—” She groaned. “Oh, Lordy, those eyes.”

“Helen!” Abby couldn’t help it; she giggled. “I never knew that. Were you in love with this guy?”

“Ha. More like in love with my dream of him. Sometimes our dreams are better than the real thing, you know.”

“You think so?”

“Of course. In our dreams, a man can be anything. In real life, he’s just another human being like the rest of us. Warts and all.”

She gave Abby a pointed look.

“Are we talking about Ben now?” Abby asked, sighing. She knew Helen had reservations about Ben—or rather, Ben and her as a couple. She’d always thought he would let Abby down one day. And of course, he had. Today.

“He just wanted to make sure we were safe,” Abby said, half in an attempt to convince herself.

“I doubt that. Following the rules, he was. Always following the rules.”

Abby’s hands were poised over the second boot, but she sat back on her heels.

“You’ve been a nun for almost fifty years, Helen. Since you were twenty-five. And you cracked a pretty strict whip when I was in school. Are you telling me now that it’s a bad thing to follow rules?”

“I’m telling you he shouldn’t have brought them here,” she said, frowning. “Not those FBI people. He broke your trust.”

Abby pulled the other boot off and Helen winced. “Ouch! Don’t take it out on my poor feet, child! I’m just telling you what you already know.”

Mornings in Carmel Valley could be cold, especially when there was fog, as there was today. Helen’s foot, when Abby took off the mended black cotton sock, was icy. She took it in her hands to rub it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tug so hard. But, Helen, when you were Marti’s and my teacher, you never talked like this. You were so…” Abby searched for the right word. “Religious.”

She thought it best not to tell her that Marti and she sometimes called her a “mealy moral mouth.”

The truth was, though they’d feared Helen then for her strictness, she was the best teacher they’d ever had. Deep down, they loved the valuable things she’d taught them. When she moved from St. Joseph’s High to the motherhouse, where Abby and Marti were training as nuns, they felt a healthy combination of anxiety and excitement.

Helen didn’t let them down. Despite her brusque attitude, Abby and Marti had always suspected their teacher had a heart of gold. She would sneak peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the motherhouse kitchen for them in the late afternoons, when their stomachs were growling and dinner wasn’t for another two hours.

And were they ever hungry. Aside from attending college classes all day to become teachers, they were still nuns, and had to follow all the rules demanded of the other sisters: up at 4:00 a.m. for prayers, Mass at six, scrubbing floors, taking turns in the community laundry…. The work of keeping up a large Gothic-style “mansion” that housed one hundred and fifty nuns, five stories and 1930s tile floors that needed polishing every week, never ended.

“My dear girl,” Helen said irritably, interrupting Abby’s thoughts, “religion doesn’t make you blind and dumb. At least, it shouldn’t. Do you think I got to be this old without knowing what people are all about?”

“Of course not,” Abby said. “I guess I’m just surprised that you’re—”

“What, jaded? Nuns don’t have a right to get jaded? Lordy me, girl, it’s been years since I’ve made the sign of the cross right— ‘in the name of the Father, the Son,’ and all that—instead of just saying one, two, three, four. You get burned out! And you should know that better than most. It’s not like we haven’t been through this all before.”

“But you’re still a good person, Helen. And, in your own way, a good nun.”

“Ha. In my own way, huh? Well, thank you—I think. My point is that you don’t have to be religious to be good, girl. That’s where some of those churches get it all wrong. God loves us all, and he’s not about to let the people he loves go to hell just because they didn’t say a certain set of words in front of a certain kind of preacher and get water dumped all over their heads.”

Abby smiled. “Tsk-tsk, Sister Helen Marie. You sound more like a renegade every day.”

“Well, maybe I’ve been hanging around you too long,” she grumped.

Abby took a cup of green tea and went into her office, debating whether she should put aside her anger and hurt of the night before and call Ben. She could at least ask if they’d caught whoever had committed the Highland Inn murder.

In the end, she decided it wouldn’t be wise to show too much interest. Ben wouldn’t even have to wonder why she’d asked; he’d know right away that she’d lied through her teeth the night before, and that Alicia and Jancy had been here.

Rubbing the weariness lines in her forehead, Abby wondered if she should call social services to see what her options were with Jancy. But even that she waffled about. Instead, she called a private investigator she often used when relocating abused women. Bobby had helped her out many times when she’d had to have a violent husband tracked to make sure she and Paseo didn’t relocate his battered wife anywhere near him.

She started out by asking him to look for Allie, and gave him certain information about her that she didn’t think the police or FBI had. With any luck, that might help him—and her—to get to Allie first.

Jancy came down to the kitchen around ten, and Binny buzzed Abby over her office intercom to let her know. Since Binny was already busy getting lunch started, Abby put her phone calls aside and scrambled up some eggs for Jancy. She’d insisted she wasn’t hungry, so Abby tossed some cheese, onions and roasted garlic cloves into the eggs, thinking the aromas might tempt her to eat. It worked. When Abby asked her if the eggs tasted okay, she shrugged and kept on eating—gargantuan praise from a teenager.

Abby sat across from Jancy at the wooden worktable and drank a fresh cup of green tea.

“Don’t you eat?” Jancy asked.

“I did, at six o’clock this morning,” Abby said.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“Sure. Not much last night, though. How about you?”

Again, Jancy shrugged. “I kept hearing noises, like real loud footsteps on the ground. I thought maybe it was bears.”

Abby smiled. “We don’t have bears around here. You probably heard the horses.”

At this, Jancy’s eyes lit up. It was easier to see that they were a brilliant green, now that most of the makeup had worn off.

“You have horses here?”

“Four of them. Do you like to ride?”

“I love it!” But her smile turned to a frown. “I guess I won’t be here that long, though, huh? You’ve got to find somebody else to take me.”

“One day at a time,” Abby said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

She washed up their dishes, and Jancy surprised her by offering to dry. After that, Abby invited the girl to join her while she practiced for her black belt in Kenpo.

“What the heck is Kenpo?” Jancy asked.

“It’s a form of martial arts. I need to work on it every morning, if I’m ever going to get that belt.”

“You’re not going to practice on me, are you?” Jancy said somewhat cautiously.

“Well, I hadn’t planned on it, but since you’re here…” From her expression, Abby wasn’t sure if Jancy knew she was kidding.

They went down the hall to the gym Abby had installed, and found Davis Bowen, her Kenpo teacher, waiting patiently in a meditative state in front of the small rock fountain he’d urged her to include in her remodeling plans. His own house was high on a hill above Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch Inn, and the view along the coastline was drop-dead gorgeous. Davis also had flowers and three different fountains in his courtyard.

“We need all the beauty we can get in this world,” he’d told Abby long ago. “I think if everyone lived surrounded by nature and beauty, there would be no wars.”

“Same thing if everyone got a massage every day,” Abby had reminded him, smiling.

“Ah, yes…another one of my dreams for creating peace on earth.”

She left Jancy with Davis and went to the locker room to change into her white gi and brown belt. She’d made her way to brown fast, pouring her angry energies into working up from blue after Marti was murdered and she herself had nearly fallen to the same fate. If anyone ever came after her again, she swore, they wouldn’t stand a chance. “First black belt” had stumped her so far, though.

Jancy watched her work out with Davis awhile, but a few minutes later, when Abby turned toward where she’d been, she saw her in front of the fountain instead. She was in a lotus position, palms up and resting on her knees, eyes closed.

Abby shot a surprised look at Davis and caught him smiling just before she sent him a Twisting Vine—including the kick to the groin and fingertips to the eyes. Davis was perfectly capable of protecting himself, so she didn’t do any damage. However, it gave her some small sense of satisfaction that she’d almost managed to catch him off guard. Not that she didn’t love Davis, but when they practiced she went into a zone where he became just one more enemy needing to be struck down.

They continued like that for another half hour. When they’d finished, Jancy was looking around the walls at the black-and-white framed photos Sister Liddy had taken of Davis and Abby training. Usually, when people looked at those pictures, they had something nice to say about them. Even flattering.

Not Jancy, though.

“I can tell from these pictures, and just from watching you today,” Jancy said matter-of-factly, “that you’re trying way too hard. That’s why you can’t get your black belt.”

“What do you mean?” Abby asked, only slightly offended that Jancy didn’t comment on how wonderful she was to have made it this far at all.

“Well,” Jancy said, shrugging, “it seems to me that you’re learning all these moves so you can know how to hurt someone—not just to defend yourself. So you’re going at it way too hard.”

“You think so?” Abby said testily.

Jancy shrugged again. “It shows that you’re insecure. Maybe you should practice meditation. Meditating could help build your self-confidence.”

“Well, thank you so much for the advice,” Abby said sweetly. “Do you think meditating could get you to stop shrugging so damned much?”

“Abby?” Davis said.

She bit her lip and turned to him.

“I’m afraid I have to agree with your young friend here,” he said mildly. “Whatever those pictures are in your mind while we’re working out, maybe they need to be a bit more…friendly. I nearly lost all hope of having children today.”

Abby flushed. “Oh, God, Davis, I’m so sorry. I had no idea—”

He grinned. “Abby, the point is moot. I’m gay, remember?”

“Oh…right.”

“So I won’t be having progeny. I sure would like to know who you’re thinking of, though, when you go off in that world of yours.”

Abby could have told him. A three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, clockwise-twisting circle down the opponent’s arm? Jeffrey.

Left foot to six o’clock, in a right cat stance facing twelve o’clock? Jeffrey.

Right kick to the groin, fingers stabbing the eyes? Who else but her former bastard husband…Jeffrey?

She sometimes thought of Marti, the horrors of her final hours, but that took her to places that made her truly afraid of what she might do.

“Sorry,” Abby said again. “Really. I’ll work on that.”

When Davis left, she gave Jancy a pair of her own black jeans and a black jersey top to wear. Then she pinned the girl’s multicolored hair up and covered it with a small veil borrowed from Narissa, one of the expostulants at the Prayer House. Giving her a once-over, Abby said, “Okay. That looks pretty good—you could pass for a nun in this getup.”